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Tips & Tricks Forum

Master your tags with descriptions!

olliebaum says:

So you've been reading the Tips & Tricks forum and found lots of brilliant ideas for how to use tags in Remember the Milk and you start tagging away to your heart's content.

But a few months pass by and you can't remember exactly what #think.fast or #gold.star means. And then you find yourself wasting time trying to remember or (in my case) batch removing tags. Well no more!

I solve this problem using a 'description' tag. For all current tags in use and any new tag I add, I create a new task with the new tag and #description. In the task name I write a description of how to use that tag for future reference.

Then when the moment comes and you're wondering "What on Earth does #hypno.toad mean?", then you simply need to search 'tag:hypno.toad AND tag:description' and hey presto you'll see a task with a description of the #hypno.toad tag and precisely how to use it.

Or simpler yet, make your 'tag description' priority 1 and then it will show right up the top of the results when you click on the tag.

I also make tag:description into a smart list and use a custom list sorting whichs groups it by tags. This gives me a nice clear title above each tag description to make it super easy to scroll through and find the necessary tag.

It's a great way to keep using tags you'd forgotten about. Or even for fine-tuning your use of tags you use all the time. I'll use my tag description to explicitly outline when to use a tag and when to use an alternative tag.

I also added a description for the description tag itself. This is simply a task with only #description as a tag. Mine looks like this:

"For any new tag, add a priority 1 task as a description so you remember how to use the tag, and tag with 'description' #description"

That way if you forget what #description does, you're still covered! 😅

Happy describing!- Ollie.

Posted at 6:43pm on September 11, 2017

robfreundlich says:

+1 for making me laugh with #hypno.toad

Also, even though I don't use tags very much in RTM, I use them extensively in Evernote, and I'm going to adapt your idea for use there. Thanks very much for the idea!